Provisioning storage on a fibre channel (“FC”) fabric involves many operations that are typically required to be performed manually or semi-manually. Server administrators generally inventory servers and FC storage adapters, have a process to maintain the inventory up-to-date, and share inventory data with storage administrators. Server and storage administrators exchange information about storage requirements for each server. The storage administrator may then create LUNs, provision LUN masking, and configure FC zones. The storage configuration should be maintained up-to-date to keep up with changes made by server administrators. When hardware components, such as servers or storage disks, are replaced, the storage administrator may have to manually re-configure FC zones and/or LUN masking.
In particular, users need to ensure storage configurations do not become stale; therefore, provisioning should be performed when servers are added or removed and when FC storage ports are added or removed. With the advent of virtualization, stateless computing, and cloud-based infrastructures, changes to the compute and storage infrastructure are more frequent, which increases the complexity of storage provisioning tasks.